Ted Williams

On 20 April 1939 the Boston Red Sox played the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium in front of 30,278 people. Each side made seven hits. The Yankees scored once in the second inning and once in the fifth. Boston did not score at all. The game lasted two hours and four minutes, and New York won 2–0. Williams was twenty years old.

The season table shows nineteen seasons spread across twenty-two years. The debut year was 1939; the last game was in 1960. The gap between those two dates is not continuous. In 1952 Williams played six games. In 1953 he played thirty-seven. In 1954 he played a hundred and seventeen. The table does not record the reason for the shortened seasons, only the games played. What it does show is what happened when the full schedule resumed. In 1953, across thirty-seven games and ninety-one at-bats, he hit .407 with thirteen home runs. In 1954, across a hundred and seventeen games, he hit .345 with twenty-nine home runs.

The highest batting average in the table is .406, in 1941. The lowest is .254, in 1959. The .406 season came when Williams was twenty-two. The .254 season came when he was forty. In 1960, the final season, he hit .316 with twenty-nine home runs across a hundred and thirteen games. He was forty-one.

The career totals are 2,292 games, 2,654 hits, 521 home runs, and a .344 batting average. The on-base percentage — the share of plate appearances that end with the batter reaching base safely, either by hit or by walk — was .482. That figure is the sum of two unusual numbers: 2,019 walks and 709 strikeouts. The walk total is nearly three times the strikeout total, which describes a hitter who made the pitcher work and who did not swing at pitches outside the zone. The slugging percentage — total bases divided by at-bats — was .634. The OPS, which adds on-base percentage and slugging percentage together, was 1.116.

The debut game linescore shows seven hits for each side, but the runs came in different shapes. New York scored in the second inning and the fifth. Boston's seven hits were scattered across seven different frames, which is the least efficient distribution possible. A hit with nobody on base scores nothing; a hit with two runners on scores two. The linescore does not record which batters reached base or when, but it does record that Boston made seven hits and scored no runs, which means the hits arrived at the wrong moments or were followed by outs before anyone crossed the plate.

The season table shows where the numbers rise and where they fall away. The highest home run total is forty-three, in 1949. The highest RBI total is a hundred and fifty-nine, also in 1949. The highest run total is a hundred and fifty, again in 1949. That season, Williams played a hundred and fifty-five games and walked a hundred and sixty-two times. The 1941 season, the .406 year, shows a hundred and forty-five walks and only twenty-seven strikeouts across a hundred and forty-three games. The 1950 season shows eighty-nine games, not a hundred and fifty. The 1952 and 1953 seasons show six games and thirty-seven games. The career lasted nineteen seasons across twenty-two years.